In busy spells -- which in the Broadway arena typically include the two weeks before Thanksgiving and the month before the various award deadlines in the spring -- it is not uncommon for critics and award nominators to find themselves at five or six a week. Eighteen in 16, though, is overdoing it.

Writing a love letter to your sweetheart is no small feat, but writing a love letter to your city? That's even harder. How do you celebrate a metropolis like Los Angeles? If you're Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, you make a movie.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is the summer's most enjoyably surprising film: a comedy that knows how to pay more attention to the feelings it explores than to creating a conveyor belt for punchlines. It earns its laughs -- and then some.